1 is out of scope for what the tool is meant to do

2 is not a bad idea but you would need to also get the upstream developers to buy into the idea.

  Original Message  
From: ToddAndMargo
Sent: Saturday, August 29, 2015 23:28
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: I asked Red Hat for two feature in xfsdump

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1258189

1) back up a directory that is not a mount point

2) compression